Harrah's Stanley knows the benefit of employee give-and-take with the business. He rotates about 20 percent of his IT staff annually into different roles in the department or the business, sometimes during a project. He also actively recruits IT-savvy business staffers from local properties and corporate business functions. The business doesn't protest. "We've given more than our fair share," says Stanley. "Marketing and operations pilfered from us for years because IT folks have functional knowledge and orientation in logic."

Stanley attracts businesspeople to IT by selling them on driving change. "They think it's pretty cool, and they know it won't preclude them from going back out into the business," he says. One employee from the strategic database marketing group who left to work as a property director for Harrah's has returned to IT as director of enterprise business intelligence. That broader exposure makes it easier for employees to see how IT and the business fit together.

However, CIO's staffing survey found only 11 percent of respondents offer job rotation programs. That's a missed opportunity.

"I believe in rotation programs," says Wallace, who's introducing them in Connecticut. She's particularly high on short-term job swapping. As vice president of IT at CNA Financial, she had the IT and business manager on a project switch roles for three months. "It worked well. They were both job swapping temporarily, so they had an interest in the other being successful," says Wallace. "It also helped us identify people from the business that we eventually sucked into IT."

Wallace also fosters a business-centric environment to nurture such skills in her IT staff. "If there's an application development effort, I don't have them measure success by whether it came in on time, on budget and according to spec. I insist they take it a step further and add business metrics."

Each member of her technical staff is devoted to a specific internal customer. As they learn more about the customer's business objectives, Wallace encourages workers to share knowledge during monthly IT staff meetings.

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